Google Calendar launch tomorrow?

Monday 5 December 2005 16.42 EST
First published on Monday 5 December 2005 16.42 EST

There's been a lot of speculation about the launch of Google Calendar -- or there was, last February. The http://calendar.google.com/ address has been live for more than two months, with nothing calendary on it. However, Erick Schonfeld reckons it could appear during tomorrow's (Tuesday's) When 2.0 conference in Stanford.

Support for the vCal standard can probably be assumed, and perhaps there will be some connection with the slow-moving Mozilla Sunbird calendar project. But the unofficial Inside Google blog raises the more interesting issue: "Will Google Calendar steal some of Microsoft's thunder and support RSS SSE? If it doesn't, it will when everyone else starts supporting it. SSE is too useful to lose, even if it was Microsoft's idea," says Inside Google.

Meanwhile Inside Google has also picked up a story from the San Francisco Chronicle saying that "Google execs have sold $4.3 billion in stock thus far this year, the majority going to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who pocketed $1.3 billion apiece." They still have shares "currently worth more than $13 billion apiece".

Comment: vCal has been around as a standard since 1997, and Yahoo launched Yahoo Calendar on August 17, 1998 (after buying WebCal Corporation for its EventCal program), but so far the idea has yet to set the world alight. Still, Google has a way of tackling old ideas -- search, mail, maps, instant messaging etc -- in new and engaging ways, so Google Calendar could be the start of something bigger.

Google Gmail users might also appreciate it if Google could copy the Microsoft Outlook feature of dragging and dropping an email message to create a calendar entry. (Or you can drag a contact to the calendar and Outlook will trigger a Meeting Request email.)